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Tip for troubleshooting in IIS - finding your requests

I spent some of my day today investigating some performance problems with a website hosted in IIS6.

The problem was that this was a live site that received several thousand hits a day. I wanted to be able to quickly find my specific requests in the IIS log.

My solution? Give my browser its own User Agent string. That way I can search for my specific entry in the appropriate log file.

I was using Firefox for this investigation. It's fairly easy to change your User Agent string:

Go to about:config in the address bar of Firefox

Right-click in the window and choose New | String.

Call the Preference Name, "general.useragent.override" and set the Value to something you'll recognise. It's usually safer to take your existing User Agent string (which you can find at http://whatsmyuseragent.com/) and just append something unique.